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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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October 20th, 2006 - Lawyer: Army After
Plea Deal |
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The military is pursuing the death penalty against a soldier from Chambersburg. By Vicky Taylor York Daily Record/Sunday News Oct 20, 2006 A U.S. Army decision to seek
the death penalty for Pfc. Jesse Spielman is part of an attempt to reach a
deal in the case, according to the Chambersburg soldier's Texas lawyer. Wednesday, the Army said it
would seek the death penalty against Spielman and one other soldier in the
case. Two others will be tried as non-capital punishment cases, according to
The Associated Press. Spielman is one of four soldiers
facing a court martial in the rape of an Iraqi teen and the murder of the
girl and her family in Mahmudiya, Iraq, in March. A fifth has been charged
with failure to report the crime and another, who was discharged before the
crime came to light, faces rape and murder charges in federal court. "This is a strategy
often used by the government," Texas lawyer Dan Christensen said of the
Army's decision to seek the death penalty for Spielman. "They are trying
to put pressure on our client to reach a deal, but we were just unwilling to
plea to something Jesse didn't do." Spielman, Sgt. Paul Cortez, Spc. James P. Barker and Pfc.
Bryan L. Howard were charged with rape, murder, obstruction of justice,
housebreaking and arson in the case. The Army has said it will
seek the death penalty against Cortez and Spielman, but not against Barker
and Howard. The Associated Press does
not say if any of the charges against Barker and Howard have been dropped,
and that information was not available from the Army on Wednesday. Spielman's team of civilian
attorneys, including Chambersburg lawyer Tom Trgovac, says Spielman was an
unwilling witness to the crimes and not an active participant. The head of
the legal team, Craig Carlson of the Carlson Law Firm in Killeen, Texas, said
the Army, in the evidence it laid out in charging documents and an Article 32
hearing in August, does not claim Spielman was a participant in the rape and
murders. Carlson, Trgovac and
Christensen say Spielman was not in on the plan and did not know what was
going to happen when he accompanied the others to the family's home. Christensen, the lawyer who
traveled to Iraq to defend Spielman in the Article 32 hearing, said all of
the defendants' lawyers were approached by the Army with offers, describing
what he called "a lot of work going on" behind the scenes to get
the defendants to plead guilty to at least some of the charges. External link:
http://www.ydr.com/newsfull/ci_4521670 ‘We
have been silent about many crimes but we will not stand rape’ By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Mahmoudiya The Guardian Friday October 20, 2006 The
only picture of Abeer Hamza Qasim is the one that appeared on her Iraqi ID
card, a black and white passport size photograph taken when she was maybe
eight or nine, black hair, round face and big black eyes. A
few years after the picture was taken, when she was 14, Abeer was gang-raped
and killed, along with three members of her family. Then her body was set on
fire. On Wednesday the Pentagon announced that four soldiers of the 101st
Airborne division are to be court martialled over what has become one of the
most emotive atrocities committed during the US-led occupation of Iraq. A
fifth soldier allegedly involved in the rape has since been discharged. Today
Ahmad Qassim, Abeer's uncle, is describing for the first time the moment he
first heard what had happened to his brother's family on March 12. He is a
tall, thin farmer with mud-covered toes protruding from his sandals and a
grey moustache. "They
called me at eight in the evening, the night when it happened," he says.
"First they just told me there has been a shoot-out and your brother has
been killed. I couldn't come until the next day. When I arrived the Americans
were blocking the main road. I told them my brother is dead but they shouted
back something in English and pointed their guns at me. I wanted to run
through their checkpoint but people held me back and told me, are you crazy?
We had to go through a back road." Later
he takes me, via the same back road, once more to avoid the Americans, to his
brother's home in this town 20 miles south of Baghdad. It is a typical Iraqi
farmhouse surrounded by palm and fig trees. "When I arrived that morning
there was still a smell of burning plastic," Ahmad recalls. Inside the
modest house, the walls and ceiling are covered with soot at the far right
end of the room. Under the window sill, the wall and part of the floor are
covered with a thick layer of burned grease, and next to it the corner wall
is stained with an arc of spattered blood. "Abeer,
was lying there," gestures Ahmad. "Part of her body was
burned." In an adjacent room, he points at another blood-stained wall:
"My brother was sitting there, his head slumped down. His wife was here
by the door. And in the middle of the room was the little girl." While
we are looking round the house, a woman wearing a shapeless black dress and a
black hijab comes in with her 13-year-old son, Omar. Omar explains how he was
outside the house showing his bicycle to Ahmad's brother, Hamza [Abeer's
father] in the yard next door when he heard noises. "I
told him: I think the Americans have gone into your house." Hamza went
to see what was happening. About half an hour later, the boy said he heard a
sound, "like beating a tin barrel with a stick few times". He went
outside and saw five Americans leaving. One carried two guns. His
mother takes up the story: "We went to the house and shouted through the
door, are you OK? Are you OK? No one answered, then we saw the smoke coming
from that window. I went to the street screaming for help, the young men from
the street came in and we broke the door down. "The
poor girl, she was so beautiful she lay there, one leg was stretched and the
other was bended and her dress was lifted to her neck." American
troops returned a few days later. "They stayed in the house all day,
they had even men on the roof," recalls her son. Blue
rubber gloves apparently left by an investigating team are still scattered
around the house. There are a number of one inch-wide holes in the floor
tiles of the room where Abeer was found. Earlier
Ahmad explained to me why locals had not reported the incident. "We knew
about the rape all along, but in the tribes if you can't do anything about it
better to shut your mouth. No one will say our daughter was raped and we
can't do anything." Iraqi
tribal society is deeply patriarchal. Honour and reputation are valued much
more highly than property. Shame can only be wiped clean by blood and there
is no worse shame for a family than rape. Shifting
his weight uneasily and drinking his tea in a single gulp, Ahmad went on:
"If we knew the soldier we would kill him but who is he? They all look
the same." He
dismissed claims by Sunni insurgent groups that the kidnapping and killing of
two US soldiers in an area near the scene of the rape was in retaliation for
the attack on Abeer. He
said his brother asked him a week before the incident if he could bring his
family to stay in Ahmad's house. He complained that the Americans were
harassing his daughter as she came in and out of the house. He
said he had little faith in a US court martial. "They should hand the criminals
to us to an Iraqi court, we don't trust their justice, they should be tried
in Iraq and be executed here." Adnan
Janabi, the leader of the Janabi tribe, echoed his view: "A murder can
be solved in a tribal council by money but rape can only be solved by killing
the perpetrator." "As
a tribe, we the Janabis don't recognise their court. The crime will not be
forgotten until the criminal pays with his life. "The
Iraqis have been shouldering lots of murders and crimes by the Americans and
have been silent. But they will not stand the crime of rape." Guardian
Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006 External link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1926954,00.html |